The Lives They Lived

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year. For readers’ tributes to loved ones who died this year, see The Lives They Loved.

By
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

B. 1947

Joseph Nicolosi

His life traced the rise and fall of the ex-gay movement.

By
BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

Nicolosi in 2015.Credit
YouTube

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi wouldn’t take gay for an answer.

It was 2012, and Alan Chambers, Nicolosi’s friend and a fellow leader in the ex-gay movement, was causing trouble by telling the truth. During speeches and television appearances, Chambers admitted that he was still attracted to men, that “99.9 percent” of people with unwanted same-sex attractions don’t change and that conversion therapy — sometimes called reparative therapy — is often psychologically harmful, particularly for teenagers.

After each public denunciation of the industry they helped build, Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist who believed that male same-sex attraction was a developmental disorder caused by childhood trauma and gender confusion, called Chambers on the phone. “If you’ll just come into therapy with me, I will fix this,” Nicolosi insisted. “I will cure this.” But Chambers was happy as he was. “I’d say: ‘Joe, you can’t promise to cure people. That’s not going to happen, nor do I even want it to happen.’”

As tense as those conversations were, Chambers could never manage to dislike his old friend, a gruff, offbeat New Yorker who could “cuss the wallpaper off the wall” and whose brashness rubbed many people the wrong way. “He was a prima donna, for sure, but he was also a breath of fresh air” in the conservative Christian world they inhabited, Chambers told me. Nicolosi stood out in many ways, including being Catholic and having no personal connection to L.G.B.T. issues. While many in the ex-gay movement were either struggling with same-sex attractions or had a family member who seemingly was, Nicolosi was ostensibly heterosexual and professed to come at reparative therapy from an intellectual and scientific perspective.

He counseled adults and teenagers from his office in Encino, Calif., where the mahogany shelves featured several of his books, including “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” and “Healing Homosexuality.” (They are jam-packed with falsehoods and absurdities, including passages like “Two men can never take in each other in a full and open manner” and “Growing up straight is not something that just happens. It requires good parenting.”)

One of Nicolosi’s teenage patients in the late 1990s was Gabriel Arana, who at 14 agreed to his parents’ request that he try reparative therapy. “Nicolosi had a very clear narrative coming in about what my life was about,” Arana recalls. “My mom was controlling, and my dad was underinvolved. And I overidentified with my mom because I didn’t feel masculine, and that was the source of my attractions.” Arana didn’t mind his weekly sessions with Nicolosi, who he remembers as warm and nonshaming, even when Arana confessed that the therapy didn’t appear to be working. “When I told him I was still meeting gay boys from the internet, he said not to feel guilty about it. He tried to position himself as the supportive father that he thought his clients didn’t have.”

Some 15 years later, Arana — by then a journalist who had long accepted his sexuality — called his former therapist for an article he was working on about the ex-gay movement. Nicolosi expressed surprise that Arana “went in the gay direction” and then shocked Arana by asking if he wanted to try therapy again. “That just shows you how deluded he was,” Arana told me.

That delusion caused Nicolosi to see transformation where there was none. Ryan Kendall, another former teenage client of Nicolosi, who blames the therapy for years of depression and suicidal feelings, remembers the day Nicolosi introduced him to one of his supposed success stories. “He trots out this 25-year-old named Kelly, who I remember finding very attractive,” Kendall recalls. “When Nicolosi’s out of the room, the guy says, ‘I’m here because my parents want me to be here, and I’m going to a gay bar later.’”

When Nicolosi died in March at the age of 70, few tears were shed in the L.G.B.T. community. (“Has he tried *not* being dead?” was a typical reaction on Twitter.) But some, like Arana, were surprised by the feelings his former therapist’s death evoked. “I felt this strange need to defend him,” Arana told me. “Part of me wonders if it’s Stockholm syndrome even all these years later. But while there were evil people in the ex-gay movement, I don’t see him as one of them. However terrible or harmful his ideas were, he believed them sincerely and ignored — whether consciously or not — all evidence to the contrary. I think it’s counterproductive to portray him as a total villain.”

So how should Nicolosi be understood? According to his son, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., Nicolosi believed that sexuality “wasn’t something set in stone for all people” and was merely “describing sexual fluidity 40 years before it became accepted.” But to Wayne Besen, a gay activist and longtime foe of Nicolosi and the ex-gay industry, Nicolosi was an enigma. “What motivated him?” Besen wonders. “Was it opportunism? Catholicism? A personal issue? Nobody could really figure him out.”

Whatever Nicolosi’s motivations, Besen calls him the most “important and destructive” figure in the reparative-therapy community, because Nicolosi — who had a Ph.D. in psychology and was a founder of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality — bolstered the movement with the veneer of scientific respectability. “He was essentially there to say, ‘You may not believe that Jesus will cure you, so here’s some science for you,’” Besen says. “It was fake science, but he used misinformation well.”

Nicolosi’s death comes at a precarious time for the ex-gay movement. Most of its once-formidable organizations (including Exodus International, Love Won Out and Jonah) have closed, and several former ex-gay leaders have apologized and accepted a gay identity. Still, gay men desperate to change — and parents desperate to change their children — aren’t without options. Only nine states and the District of Columbia ban conversion therapy for minors, and most people who practice it these days operate below the radar of state regulators. Charles Francis, the president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., an L.G.B.T. history society, warns that the ex-gay movement is quietly rebranding itself. “Nicolosi is horse and buggy compared to what’s coming our way with conversion therapy under cover of the First Amendment and religious liberty,” Francis predicts.

But Besen isn’t so sure. “The industry is a corpse, a shell of its former self,” he told me. “We’ve laid down such a robust record that proves beyond any doubt that reparative therapy doesn’t work, and is in fact damaging. It’s a joke and a fraud, and just about everybody realizes that. It’s too bad Nicolosi never did.”

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a contributing writer and an assistant professor at Emerson College. He last wrote for the magazine about anxious young people.

B. 1936

Mary Tyler Moore

She defined the idea of women in the workplace — while constantly in search of herself.

By
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER

The smile that turned the world on: Moore in 1966.Credit
Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Royal Robbins

He erased his rival in a battle for the soul of climbing.

By
DANIEL DUANE

His piece of the rock: Robbins on El Capitan in 1964.Credit
Tom Frost/Aurora Photos

One cold mountain night in 1971, Royal Shannon Robbins dangled from ropes hundreds of feet up the gigantic Yosemite cliff called El Capitan, clutching a hammer and chisel and worrying that he had made a shameful mistake. The most influential American rock climber of the 20th century, and a serious-minded fellow who disdained vanity, Robbins had spent that whole day chopping steel bolts off El Capitan, obliterating the climbing route called Wall of the Early Morning Light, created by his alcoholic rival, Warren Harding.

Robbins saw climbing as spiritually exalted — “a game in which we play at acquiring the courage necessary to a beautiful life,” as he once put it. The sport, in his view, should always be a quest for self-understanding, not self-aggrandizement. Climbers who made first ascents should consider themselves artists creating aesthetic pathways for others to follow. The canvas of the great rock walls was finite — there was only so much cliff — so those who claimed a piece of it had a responsibility to climb along natural rock features and minimize the use of permanent safety hardware, like bolts. To ignore that responsibility was to sin against the larger climbing community.

Chuck Berry

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The case for the guitar that Chuck Berry wrote “Johnny B. Goode” on.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“The last time he performed with that guitar was at Keith Richards’ place in Jamaica, where they were practicing for the movie “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll.” It’s the guitar on which he wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” which ended up on the Voyager. There are these space probes out there with gold-plated, copper records of “Johnny B. Goode.” He loved smaller audiences. He performed 209 times at my restaurant. Sometimes he would nudge the keyboard player aside and play piano. When he was really feeling it, he would sling his long leg up and then let it hit the ground, and the band would know to stop, and he would start reciting poetry or tell a joke. He intuitively choreographed the greatest stage moves — playing the guitar behind his back! He made the guitar a star.” Joe Edwards, owner of Blueberry Hill

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Dick Gregory

He chose standing up for black people over stand-up.

By
ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC

The unstoppable Gregory in February.Credit
Jefry Andres Wright

If you scan the thousands of pages of Richard Claxton Gregory’s F.B.I. file the way he scanned newspapers and magazines, mining information for material for his comedy, you will find yourself constantly landing on “racial matter” — a phrase preferred by the agency. The file tracks the rare trajectory of a man who made an enormously successful show-business career a footnote to his activism.

Gregory didn’t want people’s fear to stop them from standing up. Page 264 of the first of eight installments of his government file includes a warning from someone who was clearly afraid of this empowerment — so much so that he sent his concerns directly to J. Edgar Hoover by telegram: “I ADVOCATE AND ENCOURAGE ALL FBI AGENTS TO GO AFTER DICK GREGORY IN FULL FORCE. LET NOT ANYONE STOP YOU.”

You are a 66-year-old mother and retired high-school English teacher, bred in a small, puritanical Ohio town. Though you’ve been divorced for 30 years and celibate for almost that long, your life is full in many ways, teaching a college education course, volunteering as a writing instructor at San Quentin State Prison, escorting women for abortions at Planned Parenthood.

None of it compensates for the lack of a man’s touch. The conventional avenues for dating at your age — senior hikes, senior bird-watching, senior mixers (you even hang out in hardware stores) — have netted little. Online dating is not yet commonplace. So, one October day in 1999, you write 30 words that will appear as a personal ad in The New York Review of Books. “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Sam Shepard

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The writer Sam Shepard’s hat, at his son Walker’s home in Louisville, Ky.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He was always a pinch-front kind of guy, the style is kind of a triangular crease in the front. It’s a strong reminder of the man — of him being outside and on location and involved in the day. There is a practicality and a confidence to it. It’s a well-worn hat. His work was key to his day and it was always about process and project. I was a wrangler on Silent Tongue; it was my first job. I briefly doubled my dad on Don’t Come Knocking because the production wouldn’t let him run a horse hard because he might get hurt as the star. It was the last location work I did with him.” Jesse Shepard, son

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Scharlette Holdman

Trying to find out how murderers were made, in order to save their lives.

By
ELIZABETH WEIL

Radical and irreverent: Holdman in 1980.Credit
From Summer Lindzey

She lived in a tiny New Orleans cottage filled with Cajun barbecue, Palestinian tapestries, books on torture, dirty jokes and stacks of academic papers on topics like the effects of neurotoxins in fertilizers. For a while there was a deceased inmate in a pine box in her yard, because she believed he deserved a respectful burial, and when no one in his family offered to provide one, she took him home. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whom she defended against the death penalty, tried to give her his cabin, but the government wouldn’t let her keep it. Sister Helen Prejean liked to come over and play a card game called Beat Your Ass. “Well, hey, come in, come in, come in,” Scharlette Holdman said to everyone who walked onto her screened porch. Her Tennessee drawl, pale skin and wispy blond hair were hard to square with her radical, irreverent, voracious mind. She once fell in love with a man who knocked on her door impersonating the hunchback Igor.

Holdman developed the field of death-penalty mitigation, a dry, abstract term for the floridly fascinating practice of humanizing defendants enough to keep the state from killing them. Her clients — Jared Loughner, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Eric Rudolph among them — were hard to love, yet she loved them anyway, and not for sappy or religious reasons. Holdman believed monsters, as the state painted her defendants to be, were made, not born. One question animated her life: What happened to turn you into a person capable of doing this? She understood that if you dug deeply enough into a person’s history, two or three generations if necessary, you would find the original wound, and if you understood the wound and traced its downstream effects, you would care enough to preserve a person’s life.

Adam West

A superhero for his life and times.

By
ROB HOERBURGER

A career defined, inevitably, by three seasons in a cape and cowl.Credit
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

He was 37, and had been a Hollywood B-lister for almost a decade. Every now and then he landed a choice small part — there was that movie with Paul Newman — but his career was mostly a succession of failed TV pilots (eventually 13 in all) and roles in which he was, as he would later write, “shot up, beat up or put on trial.” Just when it looked as if the big break would never come, he was offered a part that might finally make him a household name, help him forget that he was once billed below a chimp. But there was a catch — the character was a comic-book figure already adored, or at least known, by legions. There would be expectations. And even if he got it right, he risked being typecast for the rest of his career, like most every other actor who ever played a superhero.

This was the dilemma facing Adam West, the former William West Anderson, as he contemplated becoming TV’s Batman in the fall of 1965. He certainly looked and sounded the part: He was tall, handsome, fit, his voice a Bond-like mix of suave and smarm. He had read the comics himself as a boy growing up on a ranch in the Pacific Northwest. But this Batman was different — not the tortured, noirish character who came to life in 1939, in the shadow of totalitarianism, but rather one who was ready for the colorful, splashy 1960s, the brooding cello replaced by a snappy Motown bass. Batman and his heartthrobby teenage sidekick, Robin, would still be saving Gotham City from archcriminals on a weekly basis. But they’d be doing it with a wink and a nudge, hurling pies as often as punches. Five minutes into reading the initial script, West was giggling. He knew it would be a stretch. But if nothing else, he figured, he could have some fun with the part. He took it.

Prodigy

The Mobb Deep rapper’s jacket, hanging in Desert Park, a Manhattan recording studio.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“After leaving lunch in the city, he decided to make a stop in a small boutique called Shop Untitled, where he tried on a few leather jackets. P. chose this one because of the fit and soft feel. Later, he reached out to his designer friend Gucci Ghost to freestyle customize the jacket. The last two big events he’d worn the jacket to were Q. and A.s on his latest book at Harvard and Yale. With P., it was about style, and it varied. The jacket didn’t make him: He made the jacket.” Kiki Johnson, wife

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Maryam Mirzakhani

She drew her way to mathematical greatness.

By
GARETH COOK

Peering through a window into the landscape of numbers: Mirzakhani in 2014.Credit
Thomas Lin/Quanta Magazine

Maryam Mirzakhani was a mathematician, but she worked like an artist, always drawing. She liked to crouch on the floor with large sheets of paper, filling them with doodles: repeated floral figures and bulbous, rubbery bodies, their appendages sliced clean away, like denizens of a lost Miyazaki anime. One of her Stanford University graduate students said Mirzakhani portrayed problems in mathematics not as daunting logical conundrums but as animated tableaus. “It’s almost like she had a window on the math landscape, and she was trying to describe how the things living there interacted with each other,” says Jenya Sapir, now an assistant professor at Binghamton University. “To her, it’s all happening at once.”

Mirzakhani grew up in Tehran with dreams of becoming a writer. In sixth grade, she started at Farzanegan, a school for the city’s most gifted girls, and earned the top marks in all of her classes — except math. Near the school year’s end, the instructor returned a math test marked 16 out of 20, and Mirzakhani ripped it up and stuffed the pieces in her bag. She told a friend that she’d had it when it came to math: “I’m not even going to try to do better.” Mirzakhani, though, was constitutionally incapable of not trying, and she soon fell in love with the subject’s spare poetry. As a high school junior, she and her best friend, Roya Beheshti, became the first Iranian women to qualify for the International Mathematical Olympiad, and the next year, in 1995, Mirzakhani took a gold medal with a perfect score.

Lillian Ross

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross’s locket in her Upper East Side apartment, with pictures of her son, Erik. It was given to her by William Shawn, the magazine’s editor.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He gave it to her when I was born. Anything that Bill gave her was special. He was my godfather, but also my paternal figure. She had a very special way about her that people would find easy to talk to. Occasionally, she would take me to some interviews. When I graduated from high school, we went to Paris, and she did an interview with Truffaut. There’s probably about three seconds of us in ‘Love on the Run.’” Erik Ross, son

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Barkley Hendricks

He rejected the label of black political painter.

By
JAZMINE HUGHES

‘‘Slick,’’ a self-portrait by Hendricks from 1977.Credit
The estate of Barkley L. Hendricks/Jack Shainman Gallery

For 38 years, Barkley Hendricks began his Art 111/112 class by asking each student to bring in three small objects that meant something to them. The items varied, but he dubbed this the bottle-shoe-and-plate project, because these were the objects most students chose. Over the semester, the students would draw and redraw them — in different styles, in different media, in different orders — until he was satisfied. While each student worked, he circled the room, clutching his thermos of tea with honey and lemon, peering at their papers. He was known to harangue students for not-perfectly-rounded teacups or loudly harrumph at overdramatically shadowed plates. “You’re in college,” he would chide those who disappointed him. It was a class people cried in.

At Connecticut College, a small liberal-arts school that had enough blond heads and Vineyard Vines belts around its arboretum that it looked, on certain days, not unlike a country club, Hendricks was considered “intense.” (I should know. I was there.) He made a striking reputation for himself: Students either loved him or hated him. Either way, they warned one another about him: “Knows what he’s doing but kinda mean about it,” read one review on RateMyProfessors.com, a virtual bible of student-generated reviews that was popular on campus. Another wrote, “Consider taking his courses during 2nd semester because he hates winter, so he’s more sympathetic when grades close in the spring!”

Irina Ratushinskaya

How to be free in the gulag.

By
ELAINE BLAIR

Ratushinskaya in the late 1980s.Credit
Marianne Barcellona/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images

At the end of a school day when Irina Ratushinskaya was a fifth grader in the 1960s in Odessa, her teacher stepped out of class and an exuberant student seized the moment to throw a chestnut across the room. The chestnut landed in an inkwell and broke it, splattering ink. Seeing the damage, most of the children hastily packed up and left, but Ratushinskaya and another student, a boy named Seryozha, were in charge of cleaning the classroom after school that day and had to stay. A teacher came in, discovered the broken inkwell and asked them who had done it. Ratushinskaya lied and hedged: “I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, when it happened I was searching for something in my satchel.” But when it was his turn, Seryozha simply said, “I’m not going to tell you.” His answer was a revelation. “It hadn’t even entered my head to say that,” she writes in the second of her two memoirs of Soviet dissent, “In the Beginning” (1991). “How ashamed I felt! How much more to my liking was his answer than mine!”

A poet who became an anti-Soviet activist in her 20s, Ratushinskaya was among the last wave of dissidents whose efforts helped to bring down the Soviet Union. In her years of being harassed, arrested, tried, imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, she would get far on versions of I’m not going to tell you.

Kate Millett

The feminist author’s Pierre Cardin glasses and address book in her East Village loft.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The feminist author Kate Millett’s Pierre Cardin glasses and address book in her East Village loft.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“We used to call them her ‘Sex Pol’ glasses; after ‘Sexual Politics’ came out, most of the photographs have her wearing those glasses. There’s 50 years of phone contacts in the address book, and there are very eccentric notes throughout about how she met these people. We ran a Christmas-tree farm for a while to support the Women’s Art Colony. One of the notes reads: ‘Put us on to the stumper,’ or someone who could take out the leftover stumps after the Christmas trees were cut down.” Sophie Keir, spouse

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Enrico L. Quarantelli

He proved that disasters bring out the best in us.

By
JON MOOALLEM

He was small, bald, smiley, unthreatening; he liked to find a corner, blend in, take notes. It always amazed him: everything you could see, just by looking — also, everything the people he was watching didn’t see. “Last observation to make,” he put in his notes in April 1964, watching the authorities in Anchorage scramble after a colossal earthquake. “It was only on Wednesday that people around the office began to inquire who we were.” He’d been sitting in that office since Sunday.

Enrico Quarantelli was always looking; the compulsion to notice everything, and passively accept nothing, defined him as a sociologist and a human being. “I was born Nov. 10, 1924, in New York City,” he says at the start of an oral-history interview, and when he adds, “For some reason, I remember absolutely nothing of the first five years of my life,” he seems genuinely aggrieved by this lapse in his observational record. The animating moment of his early career came in 1952, after a suite of deadly tornadoes tore through Arkansas. Quarantelli was part of a team from the University of Chicago sent to study the aftermath. The conventional wisdom held that survivors would be petrified and helpless but also, somehow, marauding and clobbering one another for food. (“The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves,” as Rebecca Solnit put it in her book about the myths of disaster response.) But after conducting almost 350 interviews in Arkansas, Quarantelli and his colleagues discovered that virtually everyone acted rationally, even generously. They protected one another. They rushed to look for survivors. There was no traffic jam to frantically flee the disaster area; the traffic coming in, to help, was worse. Quarantelli looked around and realized, he recalled, “This is a different world than what had been assumed.”

DeMarlon Thomas

Even a president’s clemency couldn’t save him.

By
RUTH PADAWER

Football kept Thomas safe while he was in school.Credit
Illustration by Denise Nestor. Source photograph by Jeff Schrier/The Saginaw News.

DeMarlon Thomas was a native son of Saginaw, a struggling Michigan city hit hard when General Motors plants closed. As he came of age, employment tumbled and crime soared, and Saginaw became the sort of place where it was way too easy to fall into trouble.

As a kid, Thomas mostly dodged Saginaw’s perils, because he was busy playing football in middle school and high school. His mother, Ceaya LaFrance Thomas, gave birth to him when she herself was in high school, so he was raised by his grandmother Willie Jane Thomas while Ceaya finished up. Though Ceaya returned to Saginaw after college and was in Thomas’s life, home for him was at Grandma’s. His mother recalls the bond those two had: “After football practice, he’d go home, take a shower and get in bed with my mama, and they’d curl up and talk about their day. He’d make her laugh. He made everybody laugh.” If Ceaya wanted to spend more time with her son, Willie Jane would say, “Well, you can just spend the night with us” — and she often did.

Trisha Brown

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The choreographer Trisha Brown’s balls on an exercise mat in her SoHo loft.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“I asked her once what she looks for in a dancer, and she said, ‘Look to the base, look at their ankles.’ She was a ground up kind of dancer. She would use those balls every morning to warm up. She had this system of rolling her body on those balls — shoulders, knees, hips, back. Sometimes I’d be leaving for school and she’d be floating on top of those balls. I always thought she could levitate. It grounded her, and it made her feel like who she was and what she was about.” Adam Martell Brown, son

Shirley Childress Johnson

She learned from an early age how to convey music without sound.

By
SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO

Johnson on tour with Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1990.Credit
Amy Horowitz

Shirley Childress Johnson became a professional sign-language interpreter at a time when the number of black sign-language interpreters was vanishingly small. The work was personal: Johnson’s parents were deaf; she learned English and American Sign Language simultaneously. She was profoundly aware of the joys of deaf culture, which demands full face-to-face engagement, as well as the urgency of making basic information accessible to the community. She attended births, trials and presidential inaugurations. She interpreted for Maya Angelou and pro bono for people she met on the street. She wrote that she took in other people’s pain deeply when she translated and struggled to “ventilate her feelings.”

She viewed that emotional sensitivity as a liability in her work, until one day it turned out to be an asset. In 1980, she was invited to work with Sweet Honey in the Rock, the internationally acclaimed African-American women’s a cappella ensemble, who perform lush, intricate arrangements of protest songs, wordless chants, spirituals and poems. The group was started in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a preacher’s daughter and a founding member of the S.N.C.C. Freedom Singers, which traveled around the country sharing news about the civil rights movement. The church where Reagon grew up in Albany, Ga., did not have a piano, so she learned her earliest lessons about what music is for and where its power lies by singing unaccompanied; eliminating instruments and paring sound down to just the voice allowed it to unfurl its full range and to join with others more completely.

John Sarno

At war with the medical establishment — and his own body.

By
SAM DOLNICK

In an elegant uptown apartment, an unhappy doctor with bushy eyebrows and a formal bearing went to sleep each night feeling like a pretender. In the morning, he knew, another batch of wincing patients desperate for relief would be waiting to see him. And he knew, despite his training and his Ivy League degree, that he had nothing meaningful to offer.

John Sarno was a rehabilitation-medicine specialist at N.Y.U., and he was doing what he had been taught — diagnosing pinched nerves and slipped disks, recommending hot pads and bed rest. But as the months passed, the advice he gave his patients left him feeling increasingly bitter. They were in pain, and he was lost.

Jimmy Breslin

The newspaper reporter Jimmy Breslin’s beloved pair of pajamas in his West Side apartment.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He always preferred to be comfortable; the writing was so natural to him, and so was being in pajamas. He didn’t make things complicated. He tried to listen to whatever conversation he could hear. Any time he heard a siren, he wanted to go. He never drove in his life; I used to drive him a lot. If we went someplace, he’d dictate his column over the phone. I’d be driving back on a highway, and we’d look for a telephone booth, and he’d call and say, ‘Gimme the desk.’ ” Ronnie Eldridge, wife

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

S. Allen Counter

He walked in the footsteps of a black explorer who was forgotten by time.

By
MICHAEL PATERNITI

Counter (center) in Greenland with Kali Peary (left) and Anaukaq Henson, sons of the North Pole explorers Adm. Robert Peary and Matthew Henson.Credit
From the Counter family

By the time S. Allen Counter got to Greenland in 1986, he had already lived many other lives — Harvard neurophysiologist, explorer, ethnographer, social-justice advocate. But in the howling hinterland, he was just a man possessed by a ghost so powerful that he had followed it into an icy hell. And Counter couldn’t believe his good fortune: to have the privilege of freezing in an igloo among the Inuit, eating walrus heart and kiviaq, little winged auks fermented in sealskin. He was giddy, set down in all of this blank space, searching out justice for a dead black man whose story had been lost under a snowdrift of white history.

Counter, a friend once wrote, was “the most interesting man in the world.” Born in Americus, Ga., he grew up in Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach, Fla., a community full of fruit-pickers and maids and servants, there to support the resort town and the wealthy whites living in seaside mansions like Mar-a-Lago. Jim Crow was a fact of life — segregated schools, beaches, train-station waiting rooms — but by at least one law, West Palm could have been considered progressive: African-Americans were allowed to own their own businesses, as long as they were in the part of town that catered to African-Americans.

Delia Graff Fara

She philosophized about vagueness — and lived with it too.

By
JAMES RYERSON

Tackling a paradox: Fara in 2004.Credit
Steve Pyke

The “paradox of the heap” seems at first like a trick, a brainteaser that must have some clever catch. But it reveals itself, as it defies easy understanding, to be a philosophical problem. You might approach it as a puzzle, only to end up devising a solution so deep that it would challenge our thinking about language, knowledge and the nature of reality. By the time of her death from brain cancer in July at 48, Delia Graff Fara, a philosopher at Princeton, had done just that.

Start with a heap of sand. If you remove a single grain, it remains a heap. Repeat this process enough times, however, and you have a heap of sand that contains, say, one grain. This is absurd: One grain is not a heap. Something has gone wrong, but it is not obvious what. Either there is a precise number of grains at which point a heap becomes a nonheap, or there is no such thing as a heap, or classical logic is flawed (perhaps it is only ever sort of true that something is a heap). Which bullet to bite?

Herbert R. Axelrod

A hustler who built a fortune on a fish tale.

By
DANIEL FROMSON

And Axelrod created a market for cardinal tetras.Credit
Illustration by Kelsey Dake

“The most profound change in my life,” Herbert R. Axelrod once recalled, began in 1955, when Axelrod, a New Jersey-based aquarium-fish dealer and the publisher of Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine, took a steamboat up the Rio Negro, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. He was searching for a supply of wild discus fishes that would allow him to break a rival dealer’s monopoly. Fishless and out of food, he got off at a small town, where he met a German priest, who happened to be a fish hobbyist.

“Yes, there are discus fishes near here,” the priest said. “But we also have neon tetras!” The priest guided Axelrod to a nearby creek and, lifting his cassock, led him into the water, where red-and-blue tetras schooled around their legs. Axelrod returned to New Jersey with “the largest neons I had ever seen” — and sent some to the curator of fishes at the Smithsonian. The curator, the story goes, excitedly called him a few days later: The neons weren’t neons at all. They were an exotic and beautiful new species.

Harry Dean Stanton

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The actor Harry Dean Stanton’s couch in his Mulholland Drive home.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He would wake up in the morning and work on the crossword puzzle and the jumble from The L.A. Times. Ed Begley Jr. would call him and say, ‘Hey, did you get 21 across?’ In between, he would watch game shows, like ‘The Chase.’ He always did his crossword in pen, and he could almost memorize the puzzle before writing it down. His passions in life were music and the crossword puzzle. He never cared that much about movies. He just didn’t feel like it was that important.” Sara Stanton, great-niece

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Erin Moran

Young children are not an obvious audience for nostalgia, but those of us who grew up in the 1970s watching “Happy Days” consumed it regularly. We were exposed, week after week, to an idealized version of the ’50s, developing a peculiar longing for a time we never knew.

In real life, the grown-ups around us were acting up: Our parents protested or maybe just divorced, and our mothers went off to work and our babysitters got high or found other ways to rebel. But every Tuesday at 8, there were Marion Cunningham, cheery and aproned, and her hard-working provider, Howard Cunningham, reliably dispensing kindly advice to their well-adjusted children. As characters on other prime-time shows wrestled with racism and sexism, the Cunninghams were, for the most part, still oblivious to the revolutions to come, their comforts unchallenged.

Maggie Roche

The songs she sang with her sisters were full of joy and harmony — the exact things she struggled to wring out of life.

By
JOHN LINGAN

Roche in New York in 1979, the year she and her sisters released ‘‘The Roches.’’Credit
Irene Young

For their devoted fan base, the Roches’ otherworldly harmonies were like an idealized sound of family. These three sisters’ voices could fly in tight formation across vast long notes and wild melodic curlicues. They could break into plaintive individual solos. The Roches were a quintessential band apart, united in a shared language.

But when the eldest sister, Maggie Roche, received a diagnosis of breast cancer nearly a decade ago, she kept it from her siblings until only months before her death in January. Her fastidious privacy underscores just how much headstrong independence was poured into the Roches’ breezy, blended sound. Maggie’s songs were vignettes of emotional hypersensitivity, and she wrote from experience.

John Ashbery

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery’s collage-making desk in his home in upstate New York.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He has been collecting collage material since he was in college. In a sense, it’s how he writes a poem: using fragments of conversation or something he heard on TV, juxtaposing things and creating environments. Collage is central to his process. It was very much trial and error. You can’t really describe what his collages are specifically about, but they deal with the process and language itself. He was, perhaps, communicating the feeling of creativity.” David Kermani, husband

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Ren Hang

His photographs scandalized his country.

By
JENNA WORTHAM

Ren in 2015 in Beijing.Credit
Bryce Zhao

Jun Sui didn’t plan to get naked for the Chinese art photographer Ren Hang. But as the day wore on, she loosened up, and the clothes came off. Ren’s shoots could become electrified with the illicitness of being nude, especially when they were in public, where such activity in China guarantees arrest or worse. The atmosphere of adventure created trust, as did the spirit of rebellion. “There was a sense of being free,” Sui told me. In person, Sui is demure, inconspicuous; in Ren’s photographs, her eyes blaze from her crouch between two upright women, her arms snaking between their thighs. “We hide the body in our culture,” Ren once said; in China, it is “a demoralization to show what they think should be private.” Ren, Sui said, encouraged everyone around him to shed that conditioning.

Ren once described his work as “satisfying a thirst.” He found beauty in almost everything — a person, a snake, a flower — and trained his camera on his friends and his boyfriend, Jiaqi, turning their bodies into sculptures. In a 2013 Vice interview, the reporter fixated on a series of photographs of people urinating — into the air, on each other, into a colorful tropical drink. “What’s with all the pee in your photos?” the reporter asked, perhaps hoping for a lurid answer. Ren had none. “I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way,” he said. In other words, urinating isn’t scandalous or erotic — it’s a biological reality, at once amusing and a fact.

Cheo

The mainland disappointed him. Puerto Rico was his home.

By
CAITLIN DICKERSON

Cheo in Sabana Grande Alta.Credit
Margaret Heredia

Eighteen hours before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Margaret Heredia stood in her kitchen, clutching the phone and looking out over San Francisco Bay. On the other end of the line, thousands of miles away, her aunt Luisa was organizing food and water reserves. She was waiting for an ambulance to pick up Heredia’s father, Cheo, and take him to a facility run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, where he was supposed to stay during the storm.

In their cliff-side homes, Heredia’s family members were hard to reach even in good weather. Sabana Grande Alta, their village, translates roughly to “big blanket in the hills,” a reference to vegetation that grows thicker as you move up into the mountains until it envelopes everything in sight. Bright green leaves seem to grow from everywhere and nowhere; they creep onto the stucco walls and tin roofs of the tiny homes, blending them into their surroundings. Bushes, fruit trees and wildflowers grow back so quickly that people traveling by foot do so with a machete to cut a path to their destination. The jíbaros, or hill people of Puerto Rico, are known for their ingenuity: They ride bareback on horses and raise chickens and rabbits in their backyards, cooking them into rich stews in their outdoor kitchens.

Derek Walcott

When the poet claimed his place on the world stage, he took a tiny island with him.

By
CALVIN BAKER

Walcott in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 1993.Credit
David Hurn/Magnum Photos

Derek Walcott’s poetry pulsated with every element literature has ever alchemized: nature, the human interior, hardship, joy, tragedy, comedy, the life of the world and the divinity of epic. And it was largely set among everyday people in a place that was often viewed as a backwater of history — a derelict Caribbean outpost of England’s fallen empire, fit for nothing but a future tourist resort.

In 1930, when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were born, the island of St. Lucia was a British colony with a scant population of around 57,000. The twins were raised, along with an elder sister, by their mother, Alix, a schoolteacher. It was a time of rudimentary medicine on the island. Their father, Warwick, died of an ear infection when his sons were a year old. He had been an amateur artist, and Walcott, who knew his father largely from his belongings still in the house, painted from an early age.

Jonathan Demme

A selection of beloved objects from those we lost.

Photographs by
JOHN PILSON

The film director Jonathan Demme’s bird watching guide.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“I wasn’t an observant bird person until I met Jonathan — he got into bird watching as a child on Long Island. He would do migratory counts; he was a bird nerd from way back. We birded in Central Park. The day that Jonathan died, a friend told me she saw the great horned owl. About a year before, Jonathan and I had visited that owl. So my three kids, my son-in-law and I went on an owl hunt and found it. It felt incredibly meaningful. His Peterson guide was a treasured book. There was always one within reach.” Joanne Howard, wife

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Glen Campbell

Certain American artists, over long careers, get so locked into a given persona that it becomes hard, at their deaths, to recall what once excited people about them. Like Bob Hope before him, Glen Campbell was a victim of a kind of hardening of affect. Even with a public diagnosis of Alzheimer’s trailing him, the genial, middle-of-the-road version of “Glen Campbell” became such a durable commodity that I had to work to remind myself what it felt like to first encounter him. That is, to sit in a college dorm in New York City in 1968, listening to “Wichita Lineman” and feeling as if the voice I heard was laying out a kind of alternative narrative for my own time. In a musical landscape dominated by the Doors, Cream and the Beatles, here was a young Southern boy singing — with unaffected honesty — about something those other groups weren’t paying much attention to: the conflict between work and love. To recall this is to marvel all over again at the wild openness of the musical choices available in the late ’60s. There was no embarrassment in choosing to play “Wichita Lineman” alongside the White Album. Jimmy Webb’s lyrics — “And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time” — were never exactly cool, but they didn’t need to be. To young men trying to figure out how the emotional landscape of early adulthood was likely to feel, they were a kind of signpost. And the singer interpreting them seemed to have risen directly out of the forlorn places he sang about: Wichita, Galveston, Phoenix. Glen Campbell came across as strangely pure.

But purity, when it arrives in an apple-cheeked, all-American form, often bends, unless fiercely protected, to a commercial pressure to become something else. In 1969, Campbell began hosting a TV series, “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” Though there was nothing “good time” about the Campbell we were introduced to (his early songs, from “Gentle on My Mind” onward, dealt with one form of sorrow or another) and though Campbell worked, over network objections, to find guest spots for underexposed country singers like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, he seemed to get caught up in what was to become a huge wave. In the late-Vietnam, early-Watergate years, the nation needed a little cheering up, and it fell to a newly revised version of “the South” to provide that. The region, unflatteringly represented since the 1940s by film adaptations of Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, got a 1970s makeover. The vision of “Tobacco Road” gave way to the vision of “Hee Haw,” the popular TV series whose corn-pone charm prepared the ground for the advent of the good old boy. Burt Reynolds in “Smokey and the Bandit” and Bo and Luke in “The Dukes of Hazzard” became the smiling standard-bearers of the New South, and the “Glen Campbell” who emerged in that era seemed almost too perfect a fit. In ads for his 1970 film “Norwood,” Campbell was saddled with the moniker “Goodtime Glen.”

Roy Dotrice

The voice that brought the voices of Westeros to life in your head.

By
CARLO ROTELLA

Dotrice in 1969.Credit
Rex Features, via Associated Press

The experience of being read to, whether it’s toddlers nodding off to “Goodnight Moon” at bedtime or 19th-century families gathering to hear the latest serial installment of “Great Expectations,” is a deep-rooted element of a love for books. A reader’s performance can add further layers of artistry and meaning to a story, and because listeners have their hands and eyes free, they can do something useful while they listen. Being read to while washing dishes, shoveling snow or working out feels like a bonus, a book-lover’s exacta of pleasure and efficiency.

Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of the publishing industry, and the masterpiece of the form to date may well be Roy Dotrice’s reading of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the source material for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The five audiobooks, totaling 201 hours, have all the strengths of Martin’s novels, which plumb the grim subjectivity of their many principal characters with patient thoroughness. And because you have approximately $11 trillion to spend on special effects in your mind’s eye, you can stage a spectacle in your head that puts to shame anything seen on a TV screen. Martin, who worked with Dotrice on the TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” recruited him to record his books because he recognized Dotrice’s voice as an instrument of sorcerous potency.

Richard Benson

Photographer and printer Richard Benson’s milling machine that hand-tooled parts for projects including making clocks, telescopes and steam engines.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“You have to understand that he made things constantly. In the back shed, he made steam engines; in the basement, he had a woodshop and a metal shop. For 60 years, he was always making something. Steam engines were a fascination of his, and I haven’t a clue why. He was like a little kid: he always wanted to figure out the way things work, he always wanted to get to the bottom of things. He was very intellectual, but he did not want to talk intellectually about steam engines. He wanted to play with them.” Barbara Benson, wife

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Dennis Banks

A life caught between power and powerlessness.

By
FRANCIS WILKINSON

Dennis Banks in 1973, in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.Credit
Bettman/Getty Images

Dennis Banks, whose Ojibwa (Chippewa) ancestors’ names were not registered on a ship’s manifest, was looking to put down roots. Born on a reservation in Minnesota, Banks was shipped off by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to a boarding school at age 5, the better to erase his heritage. When he returned home after 11 years, his mother had moved and started a new family.

In 1968, after a stint in the Air Force in Japan that ended with Banks going AWOL, and two and a half years in jail on a burglary rap, he helped found the American Indian Movement (AIM) to advance the interests of Native Americans.

Pioneer Cabin Tree

When we can no longer pass through the giant sequoia.

By
HELEN MACDONALD

A 19th-century stereograph of the tree, before its famed tunnel was cut.Credit
From the Boston Public Library

The giant sequoia was made of more than a thousand years of light and air and rain and Sierra Nevada soil. It was a survivor. It endured the fire that hollowed its base, and a lightning strike that reduced its height to around 150 feet from between two and three hundred, and it lived on for more than a century after a tunnel was cut through it in the 1880s, though it was ravaged by decay. Eventually only a solitary branch bore leaves. But on Jan. 8, the Pioneer Cabin Tree was finally lost to a storm that pried its roots free of the earth. Photographs of the aftermath show split shards and lengths of rusty timber, scraps of torn foliage upon piles of earth and ice.

The Pioneer Cabin Tree may have been the most famous tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Northern California. Once upon a time tourists carved upon its walls, punched their names into pieces of tin and nailed them inside. Vehicles and hikers made their way through it, posing for pictures. Its demise is the end of one more iconic tunnel tree, those peculiar artifacts of the 19th-century tourist trade.

Dick Gregory

Objects found inside the pockets of Dick Gregory, a civil rights activist and comedic icon.Credit
John Pilson for The New York Times

“He always had healing things with him. One time, we were on a trans-Atlantic flight in 1997, we were going to the African-American Leadership Summit in Harare, Zimbabwe, and we were traveling around with Ms. Coretta Scott King. She was in some kind of pain, and my father carried a small metal instrument — it was almost like an acupuncture tool. Everyone woke up in a panic because they smelled smoke on this chartered fight full of civil rights leaders! But that was him, healing through laughter or through his hands. He even ear-candled Muhammad Ali. Many times when people needed potions, lotions or tonics, they would call Dick Gregory. He would spend thousands of dollars at Whole Foods a week. He would be offended if you didn’t take it.” Christian Gregory, son

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

As part of the magazine’s annual The Lives They Lived issue, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year.

John Pilson is a photographer and filmmaker who is currently working on a video project titled “Parole Parole Parole.”

Things They Loved interviews by Jaime Lowe, a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of “Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind.” She last wrote a feature about incarcerated female firefighters.

Lettering by Stacey Baker

IN MEMORIAMJanet Elder, a newsroom leader and friend.

Produced by Gray Beltran, Rodrigo de Benito Sanz, Kyle Ligman and Alice Yin.